What is a Guest Post? A Guide for Marketers.

Here’s a question we get a lot from customers: What is a guest post? How is it different from a regular blog post? A guest post is an article written and posted on someone else’s blog. When you write something on your blog, it’s just a “post”, but on someone else’s blog, the author is a ‘guest’. Guest posts are valuable tools for reputation marketing and reputation management for several reasons, such as getting your brand mentioned or capturing branded search query results. But most people use it to embed backlinks for SEO reasons. Guest posts are often misused, though; we will discuss the abusive aspects later in this article. If you’ve got someone else’s blog to write for, you’re a ‘guest writer’. We’ll assume you’re doing both of these things to extract and hope to get a link back to one of your own web properties.

The Basics of Guest Posting;

Here are some guidelines for writing guest posts that you should know. There is a lot of information on the Internet about this topic, and we’ve included links to many good resources at the bottom of this article. But here are the quick and easy basics.

Important things to remember about guest posts;

• Guest post should be well-written. Search engines are choosing, and so are people.
• Posts must be on topic. People will want to read them to get the most value. You don’t want people to come to your post and then click back to the search results because the posts are irrelevant, as bounces can lower your post’s value in Google.
• People should share your posts using social media. Sharing increases readership. In reputation marketing, social media sharing helps spread the word.
• The outbound links you put in your posts should be helpful and relevant to the article. Make sure the anchor text on the links is correct.
• Don’t post on sites that post a lot of guest content because the links are too useless.

Who can write a guest post?

Almost anyone can write a guest post, but very few people can write a really good post that goes viral. You can’t usually make a post go viral. But it doesn’t have to go viral. It just needs to be helpful, on-topic, and well-written to generate traffic and link juice over time.

A good guest post is on-topic, relevant and of varying length. Most guest posts are between 500 and 1000 words, but people like Neil Patel say they should be longer. More like 2500 words. Statistics show that more content means your web page is more likely to rank higher in Google results. But there is absolutely no need to write long letters. Writing a good post is more important than a long post.

For a detailed overview of how to write posts for people and search engines, check out this post about SEO-enabled articles.

Sometimes it’s worth it to hire a professional to write guest posts because it’s important to do it regularly.

Blog Post Headline Basics;

Let’s say you’re in the llama shaving business and the search phrase you want to protect or improve is ‘Lloyds Llama Shaving Business’. In this case, you might have written articles to post on someone else’s blog, and the titles of those posts would be something like:

• Best scissors for shaving llamas.
• Answers to the top ten llama shearing questions.
• Secrets of shaving llama revealed!
• Legendary llama shavers throughout history